Okay, here it is.
There's been a ton of stuff about the 1.7s so a few weeks back I took a ride down to my local dealer to hear what all of the fuss was about and see how they stacked up against my 1.6s which I've listened to daily for the past three years.
I bought along Frank Zappa's Apostrophe as I've heard it a million times and it has a bit of everything on it.
What I heard at the dealer's was a bit underwhelming: a very wide soundstage, the vocals sounded great and just came out of nowhere but there was no top end whatsoever. The guitar should sound like a razor but this was just flat.
I stayed for a bit and then left really disappointed. Was it the room? Was it the equipment? Was it the speakers? What's the deal?
So, last week I bit the bullet and got some 1.7s.
To give some frame of reference, amps are VTL 300 DeLuxe monoblocks with fresh Winged C tubes, the preamp is a Sonic Frontiers SFL-2 with fresh tubes of some sort of unknown Russia brand from the tubestore, the CD player is a Jolida JD100 with Sovtek tubes, speaker cables are Kimber 4TC, interconnects are custom made silver, the turntable is a Well Tempered with an Ortofon 2M Black cartridge w/ a Jolida JD9 phonostage w/ Sovtek tubes and there's a small NHT sub.
It's not the latest and the greatest but it all works well together.
The room itself is a kind of an acoustics nightmare as I converted the attic into the master bedroom so it runs the length of the house and is a bit oddly shaped. The stairwell presented more than a few problems.
At any rate, the 1.7s can be considered to be a different speaker model than simply an updated 1.6.
The first tip off should be that the are very specific about setting up the tweeters on the inside. You'd think that would make the sweet spot about the size of a postage stamp but that's not the case - these have a much wider sweet spot than my 1.6s which I listen to with the tweeters on the outside.
The soundstage is also deeper (if that makes any sense). VTLs do a really good job of presenting a three dimensional soundstage but the 1.7s do it quite a bit better than the 1.6s. Picture going from regular headphones to a pair of Stax electrostatics and you've got the idea.
For once I actually was there when the speakers broke in - at about the 5 hour mark this annoying haze just vanished. Pretty neat.
I'm happy to say that the highs were back and Zappa's guitar had that razor blade sound to it. The bass was pretty much the same as the 1.6s.
The midrange is MUCH better than my 1.6s and detail resolution is better, too. Certain things that were always buried in the mix before were brought to the forefront so I was hearing details that I'd never really noticed before. Oh yeah, there is some piano in there and I don't remember that drum bit - stuff like that.
The sound is more cohesive from top to bottom as well. I don't know how else to describe it but it sounds like one big speaker, not a couple of different sections.
The biggest improvement is that to make the 1.6s (and other Magnepans) sound good you need to crank the volume up a bit. At lower volumes they just don't cut it. With the 1.7s, they sound really good at lower volumes.
I really like my 1.6s but these are a step up - they did their homework on this one.
I should mention that the 1.6s aren't going anywhere, they're keepers.
This concludes the first installment of my thrilling review.
Next weekend I'm going to lug them downstairs and see how they stack up with a pair of 3.6s. I'm really curious to see if the soundstage will be large enough and how they'll compare with the ribbons.
